In this unit, you’ll gather evidence and make an assessment decision. It's doing what you planned to do.
Previous chapters told you how to plan the assessment. That included choosing the competency standards and other relevant benchmarks, and interpreting them so they would work in your situation.
You then chose the activities and designed assessment, taking into account students' needs, and planned any reasonable adjustments. You developed tools and consulted a supervisor to know you got your planning right.
It’s now time to put all that planning into practice.
Gathering evidence is basically carrying out the plan. Use assessment tools for gathering evidence or give them to students so that they can gather evidence themselves (e.g. for a portfolio).
Ensure that evidence is organized in a suitable format so that you can assess it. Keep an eye on students during the assessment; they may need help if they get stuck.
Relating to your students
Nobody enjoys being assessed. Students are often nervous, fearful, and in need encouragement. Your attitude affects student performance. If they feel that you have created a friendly, supportive environment, they will perform more satisfactorily than if you appear to create a hostile environment.
Your first step is to establish a working relationship with the student. Of course, you’ll need to maintain it throughout the assessment.
Your attitude is important. You will need to guide and support students and give them encouragement. You will need to be sensitive to any issues arising, including your own role in the relationship. Be humble enough to accept and utilize feedback.
If you observe students a little, you will figure out the best kind of interpersonal approach you need. You will need to develop a professional relationship, but you will still need to be sensitive to students’ individual differences. This is especially the case for members of potentially marginalized groups.
A two-way discussion
You will also need to discuss the assessment with students and give them full opportunity to ask questions, even if they are shy or reticent.
Your discussion with the student should be two-way, with you being an active listener who asks questions to clarify what was said and confirm that you both understand. Watch out for non-verbal messages as well as verbal messages; make sure you interpret them accurately.
You need an appropriate communication style for the specific context. For example, it should mirror the language used in the context, so that students understand it and feel comfortable with you.
Establish ways to encourage communication and feedback between you and the student; make sure you can both communicate anything necessary. Be careful to avoid monologue explanations. Let the student ask questions and clarify anything that he/she is unsure about. If you and the student have an agreement to be honest with each other, then it can benefit you both:
Ask the student about his/her preferences, needs and expectations, and address any inclusivity issues and other potential problems. You may negotiate to achieve an assessment approach that works for both you and the student.
You need to make sure the assessment goes smoothly, saves time and money, and gives the student a fair chance of success. In current thinking about assessment, fairness involves informing students of the assessment criteria before they are assessed. Put another way, it is unfair to assess students without first telling them the standards they must reach.
What you must tell students
Make sure that students have a copy of at least the elements before the assessment; it is not enough to tell them verbally or to put a copy on a notice board. It is normal practice to provide students with written information on the assessment at the beginning of the term or semester, usually in the unit description. Be aware that students may have lost written information given to them at the beginning of the unit.
During the whole process, you will need to:
Take time to explain to students any factors affecting the assessment. The RTO’s admissions officer may have handled some of these, but you should explain anything still unclear. The point is that the students go into the assessment knowing what to expect so that there are no nasty, unfair surprises.
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What you might not be able to tell students
In some cases, the student is not permitted to know some things about the assessment. For example:
Check what other factors might affect the assessment
The list of assessment factors is quite long, and many might not apply in particular situations. Factors affecting the assessment may be:
Tip 1If you do on-job training, you can usually delay the assessment until students are up to speed and ready. Then almost all your students will pass well. | Tip 2The best way to start an assessment is to get the student to show you around their workplace and tell them what they do. You can ask them anything they don’t explain. They’re quite comfortable on their home turf and will often tell you most of the things you want to know. Then when you come to the formal assessment, you be able to skip anything they’ve already explained in full. | Tip 3Students are normally nervous before any assessment, so it’s essential that you put them at ease beforehand.
You must make an assessment decision on each unit based on the evidence that you gather. Your decision must be in line with the standards and procedures that you are using and the evidence that you have gathered. Remember your limitations; you can ask an experienced assessor for help if necessary. It is a judgement call, but the closer the fit between evidence and assessment criteria, the easier it will be.
The Certificate IV defines making an assessment judgement as a two-step:
If you are using a graded assessment system, it is then another step after that.
Assessors are people and have unconscious biases. It's not just everyone else either. It includes you and me.
The best antidotes are:
Professionalism in assessment requires that you realize when you are biased and adjust your assessment approach. Here are some of the main biases that unconsciously weaken assessment:
Many of these can also work in the negative, biasing you to presume that the student is not yet competent. For example, you might presume they’re not yet competent at one thing because you’ve seen that they’re not yet competent at something else.
A great deal of the assessment problem is elimination of doubt, the fuzzy area where the decision could go either way. In the doubt gap, no decision is really defensible:
|
Clearly competent |
The doubt gap |
Clearly not yet competent |
You are caught between two options:
You can seldom be absolutely sure. It’s always possible to ask for more evidence and then face the problem of over-assessing. Besides, assessment criteria at the higher levels are usually abstractions, which can always be reinterpreted.
We only need to be sufficiently sure based on sufficient evidence. So how much is "sufficient"? Enough for someone else to independently draw the same conclusion from the same evidence.
In a good assessment decision, you can show which side of the gap the student is on, because there is enough evidence to minimize or even eliminate doubt. As we saw, good assessment tools go a long way to put you in this situation.
There is more than one way to view making an assessment judgment:
In other words, if you conclude that you have insufficient evidence to make a decision, you must give a "Not yet competent decision". But you'd normally give the student a chance to supply more evidence.
You can make your assessment decisions more reliable by calculating the risk of making a wrong decision.
Most assessments have some level of risk, especially RPL where evidence comes from a variety of sources. Besides, students with "dodgy" credentials really need RPL because the assessment process will hopefully result in a nationally recognised qualification.
If you assess a person as competent when in fact they are not, there may be legal consequences. If you assess them as not yet competent when in fact they are, it may adversely affect your RTO’s reputation and result in a messy appeal.
What to do
Verify evidence. It is normal good practice to verify evidence, and necessary if there is any reason to doubt it. Besides an email, phone call or visit, the organization’s website may be helpful.
Get more or better evidence. If the evidence is too risky to clearly demonstrate that the student is competent, you might need to decrease the risk by collecting more evidence. Otherwise you are forced to state clearly why the evidence is high risk (e.g. "reference cannot be verified") and give a "not yet competent" decision.
A few assessments have a sudden death factor. If students get something essential wrong, they must be assessed as Not yet competent, no matter how good they do everything else in the assessment. This is different from a minor error made by a competent student who still has room for improvement.
Here are a few examples:
In many kinds of skills, it's only fair to give students a second chance if they didn't demonstrate it the first time. It's basically unfair to write off students who fail on their first attempt, especially if they're very nervous.
This is not a problem in straightforward demonstrations of skill, where classroom scheduling might not be a factor. Supplementary examinations might be possible in other cases.
However, you are not obliged to give students more than one chance in all situations. For example:
Question: "What if a student is assessed as not yet competent on the second assessment attempt? Do I then give him/her another chance? How long can this process go on for?"
Answer: The student is entitled to a second chance. Even if he/she doesn't get the whole qualification, the RTO must issue a Statement of Attainment for any units in which you assess him/her as competent.
If you wish, you could give the student a third chance, but you don't have to and he/she is not really entitled to it. You are quite within your rights to say, "This was your second assessment of these units, and you weren't successful. You are welcome to try again, but you'll need to apply and pay again for them."
Students are normally very keen to know how the assessment went, and apprehensive about the result.
Their first question is: "Did I pass?" If they gain a "competent" result, they might be so relieved that they don’t care about your feedback at the time. If you write it down, they can come back to it later.
Feedback to students can include lots of things:
A.S.A.P.
Give feedback as soon as possible after the assessment. It will have more effect and students will remember the correction rather than any mistakes they might have made. The longer you delay, the less notice the student takes.
Otherwise, the timing varies greatly depending on the assessment mode. Assessors can give students immediate feedback on an individual oral examination, but a large pile of written assessments takes days or even weeks to assess.
Be positive
Feedback should be clear, constructive, and helpful. Be polite and positive, and comment on things well done. Give more positive than negative comments so people feel encouraged rather than crushed. It's good advice to start with positive comments, then give negative comments and conclude with positive comments.
Where possible, this is the most appropriate stage to give the student guidance on further opportunities for training. If there are gaps in the student's abilities, this is a good time to talk to the student about them.
Your task is more difficult if the student has done an assessment task unsatisfactorily. They might be despondent, disappointed, defensive, or angry about a "not yet competent" result. A negative result may have serious employment ramifications for them (e.g. they lose a promotion or lose their job). If you have bad news, it is your job to give it, and you do have to tell the truth.
Put your comments in writing
Verbal feedback is usually necessary, but it's good practice to write it down too. Giving feedback is a requirement and you may need to prove that you have done so in an audit.
Get their feedback on how you went
As the assessor, you should get feedback from the student on how they thought the assessment went.
Record and report assessment results
Use the forms that you developed in the planning process.
Assessment records are obviously extremely important and must be made at the time of assessment; they cannot be done by memory later on.
Many colleges have their own procedures for records and deadlines for the submissions. Where the law affects assessment (e.g. some kinds of licensing) compliance with legislation should be built into your RTO's procedures.
You need to:
How to do an assessment interview